April 24, 2010

The Fate of the Future & the Ironies of Artistic "Futurism"

“The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!"They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds, which will have already been promised to the literary catacombs.”--from the “Futurist Manifesto”, by F.T. Marinetti, 1909

They came for Mr. Marinetti a little earlier than that, and continued to come, though whoever it was that came couldn’t quite reach the founder of futurism, who seemed to be one invisible step ahead of oblivion. Or perhaps it was behind? I’m not sure.

But futurism as a movement was more in the past than in the future, barely lasting long enough to have anything but a past.

Not that the movement wasn’t important–it was, obviously–its importance branched out into other areas and movements, morphing into necessary branches, leaving behind a shell of the original tended by the originator. (It can be argued that this movement helped create the environment for Dadaism and Cubism [or at least Cubist-futurism as in the Russian sense of that art].) Marinetti had some unsavory and some jsut downright weird political and social ideas, having a long and vested interest in fascism.1 And not only the earliest part of Italian fascism –founded in 1919 with an interest in expanding the democratic process–but the later, Mussolini-controlled Italian fascism as well. Marinetti sought the protection of Il Duce,2 and even so during the war, when he sought to protect his movement’s art from being designated as “degenerate ” and therefore unacceptable and existence-deniable by Adolf Hitler.

This is the cover of a magazine edited by Marinetti and others, a hagiographic-porn hommage to the leader of the Italian fascist government, Benito Mussolini, featuring a very striking portrait of the leader on the cover.

And so the unlikely prolonged existence of futurism--a movement transformed far beyond itself in a matter of years, held together by pieces of fluff and dust, supported in its old age on the hopes of a noxious political system which was itself doomed to rapid failure.

“At last they’ll find us—one winter’s night—in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.” –F.T. Marinetti, from his “Futurist Manifesto”, 1909

Notes

1. Marinetti's goal was to establish futurism as the official art movement of the government--something he specifically wrote against in earlier incarnations of himself. He would come to loggerheads with much of his earlier social opinions, abandoning his beliefs in his never-ending quest to promote his movement. I must say though that Marinetti did publicly speak against anti-Semitism.

2. Marinetti sought to have the Nazi traveling exhibition of degenerate art--which included works by futurists--banned from Italy. So even though the Nazi fascists established futurism as degenerate, Marinetti was able to enlist the aid of Mussolini to shield Italians from what the Nazis thought of the art. But the futurist manifesto seemed comfortable with the while idea right from the start, as we can see in proposition #9 of its self-proclamation: "We will glorify war – the world's only hygiene – militarism, the
destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for
and scorn of woman..."